


On Sunday, After the War

by MadameReveuse



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Coping, Depression, Friendship, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, as well as can be expected
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 21:54:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21022853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameReveuse/pseuds/MadameReveuse
Summary: Thomas Nightingale's first few weeks back in the Folly after the war. Molly is equipped to handle many things, but perhaps not quite that. Nevertheless, she does her best.





	On Sunday, After the War

_Well I'll try to get used to my house and my bed,_

_When the flags have been folded and put in the drawer,_

_I'll try to forget what I've got in my head,_

_On Sunday just after the war_

_So I'll see you on Sunday just after the war,_

_We'll cast our remembrance down in the grave,_

_Where so many others whom no one could save_

_are smothered in brothers as brave_

* * *

Molly has cooked way too much for dinner.

Perhaps it’s simply because she’s used to serving larger crowds. Perhaps she’s gotten a bit over-enthusiastic to have anyone back to serve at all. Or maybe she’s planning to get him back up to a healthy weight within the span of a single evening. It feels strange, the two of them playing house here like this is an ordinary evening, with him sitting down in the dining room to eat and her serving him, as though there was any sense or point to any of it, as though they weren’t the only ones left, going about their set little routines as like they're the restless spirits here. The food is still heavens compared to military rations or the hospital food later on, so Thomas eats as much as he can without becoming nauseous, and then excuses himself from the table with a cramped smile, a polite nod, some muttered formalities, an observance of manners in the face of everything else failing. Molly cocks her head and watches him go silently.

She has made his bed as well. Thomas feels as though he’s hovering a bit to the left of himself, watching himself ready for bed: a stranger interacting with the strange space that the Folly has become. The hurry-up-and-wait of war has become the rhythm ingrained within him, sleep a flighty thing that is caught in snatches, a few minutes dozing in a makeshift shelter, a brief nap on a moving vehicle, leaned against another man. Now he’s brushing his teeth and putting on pajamas. 

The Folly is too large and cold and dark and empty. He is to make a life in all this emptiness, he is to continue doing his job here as though the others had all stepped out for a quick lunch break, as though the foundations of Newtonian magic haven’t crumbled, leaving him standing in the dust. Traversing the empty hallway leading from the empty bathroom to his empty bedroom, his right hand skimming walls and surfaces, feels like a disconcerting dream.

The bed takes some adjusting to. How often has Thomas fantasized of sleeping on a real, soft mattress again? It feels untenable now, like he’s sinking into all this softness, like the bed is going to swallow him, like the pillow’s going to suffocate him. Furthermore, it doesn’t feel _safe_. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous, that he has to become acclimatized to real life again, but after an hour and a half without a wink of sleep, he gives in to the ridiculousness of the situation. Really, it was easier to catch a nap on top of a moving Sherman…

He drags the pillow and down comforter onto the floor with him and gets comfortable on the persian. The pillow is still an irritant so he throws it back onto the bed and rests his head on the crook of his arm. After a few minutes’ consideration, he gets up again to open his dresser, takes out his army boots and puts them on. He gathers up his staff on the way back and grips it loosely in his free hand as he stretches out on the rug again: there is no comfort in not having his staff nearby. The wood of it is polished smooth from frequent handling, a rather soothing sensation. Now _this _is a prime sleeping opportunity.

Thomas is woken up in the morning by a hissing noise close to his ear. He flinches upright thinking for a moment it’s an incoming shell, only to find himself in his bedroom, in the Folly, in London, in England, stretched out on the floor with Molly hovering over him. It is her the hissing emanates from, soft and concerned. On further consideration, it doesn’t sound that much like shelling. It’s more like a gently steaming tea kettle, a homey little sound. Thomas wipes the sweat from his brow and bids Molly a good morning.

Molly takes a step back upon finding him awake but she still hovers, looking from him to the bed in obvious confusion. Thomas can do naught but shrug, like… like a man who just spent a night sleeping on the floor next to a perfectly serviceable bed with his boots on. It seems rather silly in the light of day.

“It takes some adjusting,” he says. “I’ll get back to it in no time, I’m sure.”

‘No time’ looks closer to two weeks, two weeks of getting under the covers steadfastly resolved to see the night through this time, only to abandon the endeavor after any number of sleepless hours. But every day he holds out a little longer, and even manages some fitful sleep on the too-soft mattress. Thomas compromises with himself and keeps his staff close when he gets into bed, starting out in the evenings leaning it against his nightstand, but invariably groping for it in the dead of night, desperate for the reassurance of the solid weight of it, as if that would keep the night terrors at bay. 

He doesn’t ever dream of the men he killed, probably because he does not regret them: werewolf or ordinary foot-soldier, none of the Jerries whose blood got on Thomas’ hands one way or another causes him any pangs of conscience. But without fail, when he closes his eyes, there they are, the lads under his command, his comrades, his friends, brought back to enact their deaths once more, night after night after night, mangled limbs and faces grotesque with pain, pleading with him, angry. Because he couldn’t… _didn’t _save them. Because he selfishly got himself out, himself and next to no one else. If he’d tried… if he’d done better, been stronger, been faster, been a reasonably competent CO and looked out for his men as he was supposed to, if he’d done his duty, maybe some of them would actually be here, not as ghastly figments of his unnerved imagination, but whole and hale and living, to keep him company in the Folly. Maybe he wouldn’t have failed them. They’d trusted him, and is he not The Nightingale, is he not this singularly gifted practitioner who loomed larger than life, is he not their Captain whom they’d trusted to get them home, how could he possibly have failed their trust? Yet fail he did-

He knows rationally that they are not really here, almost wishes they were, because there are ways to exorcise wayward ghosts and have peace. Yet, at the same time, the thought itself seems like a sacrilege. Real or not, Thomas cannot exorcise his fallen brothers, selfishly vanquish them again for a peace of mind he doesn’t deserve. So when, night after night, it feels as though the fallen congregate around his bed, restless and cursing him for abandoning them to die and to remain face-down in the mud and snow of a hostile country never to see home again, Thomas cannot bring himself to deny them. _You’re right, you’re right, just let me sleep, I know, I know, I don’t deserve it, but please, only the one night, there’s only me left, don’t you see, I need it, I still have a duty,_

And he’ll shiver himself to sleep, hands clenched around his staff and his head buried in the pillow in the ludicrous hope that the specters will go away if he just doesn’t look, like a kid hiding under a blanket from the bogeyman, and he’ll wake up in the mornings feeling more drained than when he went to bed. Molly comes in to wake him at precisely the same time every day, but each time it takes Thomas a little longer to get up and follow her downstairs for breakfast. Once he’s become somewhat accustomed to using his bed again, _leaving _it seems to become a problem. But Molly has mostly stopped giving him these concerned looks she’d give him when she’d find him on the floor again for yet another morning, so that at least is a positive.

Eventually, it gets so that Molly has to come in a second time, and when she sees that, as morning slides softly into noon, Thomas is still not up, she lingers in the door with a laundry basket until he relinquishes the bed and lets her strip the sheets. When he does eventually make his way into the breakfast room, Molly sticks around after serving him, catches his eyes and points a finger at the window. It takes a little pantomiming to gather that she wishes for him to go out. 

“Do you need an errand run in town?” Thomas asks, but Molly shakes her head and stares at him. It seems she wants him to simply take a walk, or maybe she is planning to clean today and doesn’t want him underfoot. That should probably be it.

He doesn’t get terribly far from Russel Square. It’s bright, and loud, and jarring. There are too many people on the street, elbowing their way past, and Thomas is holding his staff in a vice grip and attempting to calm his breathing, all the while feeling terribly out of place in his civilian coat and hat and sensible shoes that are not the boots he still sometimes sleeps in. Surely all these people out here going about their lives can see that he is unlike them, that he is tainted by the war where they are not. A car next to him misfires and Thomas freezes, because god, does it ever sound like… sound like… 

And there he is, frozen on the pavement, heart palpitating, willing himself with all his strength to defy his every screaming instinct and _not _dive for cover.

He is jittery with restless energy as he makes his way back to the Folly, and he performs a thorough perimeter check of the building, sweeping through and assuring himself that all the safeguards hold. He peers into dusty offices, dusty bedrooms, some even still containing the possessions of the people who once lived here, as if they might come back any minute to continue their lives where they left off. Further down the stairs there are dusty laboratories, the dusty gym (even Molly’s furious cleaning sprees can’t seem to keep up with the dust), and the triple-padlocked room that houses the damned library. Thomas hasn’t been down here since he first got back, and it makes him shudder to think… so he doesn’t, and hurries back up the stairs.

That night, for the first and only time, he dreams of David, David who sat here by himself with the goddamned library while his formidable mind drowned in its own poisons. How is Thomas to live here, in this dusty mausoleum haunted by himself and Molly, under the same roof as that atrocious library, under the same roof where David was driven to…?

He tears himself from sleep at around midnight, and sneaks into the drawing room where the old guard used to keep their communal liquor cabinet. Molly catches him cleaning it out and shakes her head slowly, mournfully, but what can she do? What can he do? What can anyone ever do? Thomas drinks himself senseless, promising himself_ just this once_, and sleeps uninterrupted for the rest of the night.

The following day he spends drifting, waiting for the headache to subside, willing himself to think of nothing. Molly takes one look at him and decides to leave him be. Before he knows it, it grows dark, then light around him again, and really now he should go and rejoin the world of the living, if just to keep Molly from worrying, but it’s too hard. His duty… hah, his duties have shrunk down to: _get up, get dressed, join Molly for breakfast, perform perimeter check…_ and why? What for? There is no one left to see him succeed or fail - succeed or fail at _what_, anyway? There is _nothing _left, it’s as though the war has sucked the magic, the life out of the world. Why get up in the face of that and go through the motions, day after blasted day, what for? 

So Thomas doesn’t. Simply doesn’t… anything. He used to travel the furthest reaches of the empire, but now his life is shrunken down to England, to London, to the Folly, to this room, to this bed. _Get up,_ _get dressed… join Molly for breakfast…_ the concept seems insurmountable. The silence in the Folly used to unnerve him, now every single noise filtering in from outside, even just Molly going by outside with the mop, makes him flinch and shrink further into himself. The outside world is large and perilous and over-bright and full of sorrows, and Thomas is about ready to quit it. Getting up would mean facing the expectation put upon him to get on with it, get on with his pointless duty, keep providing an example to whoever survived Ettersberg and the long march home, keep up the pretense that he is alright and keeping on top of things. He simply can’t.

Molly takes to bringing him his meals on a tray, as though he is sick. He’s simply fatigued, is all, and though he treasures Molly’s cooking and does not want to make her feel bad by letting it go to waste, he can’t bring himself to do more than nibble listlessly on some toast. He gets up to follow nature’s call, and avoids looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, and that’s the extent of it. He knows he has to shave, but he can’t touch the razor and hasn’t got the patience for it besides. He knows he’s not doing himself any favors, that his nerves aren’t getting less shot this way, but the thought of facing the world only becomes more unbearable as time passes, and every day he feels the weight of it all pressing down upon him that little bit harder, pinning him in place.

Thomas doesn’t know how long this goes on, only that he’s becoming intimately familiar with every crack in the stucco of the ceiling, when Molly appears and taps her foot in a decisive manner. 

“I can’t, Molly,” he tells her, his voice rusty with disuse. “I know what it looks like. But I can’t.”

Molly crosses her arms.

“No, I know. I heard enough of that at the hospital. Don’t hold back on my account, tell me I should show some backbone and get up and be merry that at least I survived. Celebrate because we won. Go on, call me a coward, Molly.”

Molly, of course, doesn’t open her mouth to dispense judgment. She doesn’t say anything, as is her way. Instead, she comes closer, haltingly, as if hesitant, and puts a hand on his.

The sudden touch is almost startling and Thomas flinches, causing Molly to spook as well and start to pull her hand away, but Thomas grabs it and holds it there for just a moment before his sense of propriety overwhelms him. Molly’s hand feels cold and bony. He looks up into her face and he never found out what her life was like before she came to the Folly, but her eyes are a bottomless fount of knowing.

He’s about to pull away when her touch changes, firms, and he’s being pulled upright, suddenly sitting on the edge of the bed. An astonishingly pointy finger jabs between his shoulders (carefully clear of the war wound) and Thomas realizes he is being needled out of bed. Molly nods her head at the dresser, indicating some freshly folded clothes she laid out for him.

“I don’t know if I can.”

Molly nods again.

Thomas Nightingale spent four days on end being pursued by werewolves across Germany in winter, but you couldn’t tell from the horrible eternity it takes him to traverse the bedroom. Every step seems to take an inordinate amount of energy, but not unlike on the long walk home, he brings himself to keep putting one foot in front of the other... because Molly is there. Molly turns around to let him change, but doesn’t leave the room. He perceives himself moving as through a thick fog, yet still, somehow this feels like a win.

* * *

Molly shaves him.

She recently absconded with his razorblade and locked all other sharp objects within the Folly in a kitchen drawer for reasons unknown - or for reasons known, but politely not discussed. When asked, she simply points out the drawer, then the key on a piece of string around her neck, and Thomas has done his level best to shrug off the fact that he appears to be under suicide watch. But Molly has unearthed the razor and shaving cream and sat him down on the rim of the bathtub, and Thomas feels no discomfort when she approaches him with the blade. Having her shave him would feel gross under other circumstances, would make Thomas feel like he's one of the arseholes who used to try to get friendly with Molly in all the wrong ways, who somehow had a nude painting made of her. (Out of the thousands they lost all over the continent, Thomas finds himself mourning these few a little less.) The fact that none of the sentiment is present in him, and that she's doing this simply because he is in no state to and out of her own free will and initiative, negates that somewhat. He shuts his eyes and lets her work and it feels nothing but relieving to be rid of all that stubble. She turns his head towards the mirror afterwards, and he tries to dodge away then, but her grip on his chin is surprisingly solid, so he looks. 

He winces at how gaunt his face has become, how unkempt his hair, how hollow his eyes, but at least now he’s clean-shaven. He nods at Molly and draws a corner of his mouth up, attempting a smile to convey his gratitude. It’s the first time he tried to smile since he got back home. Molly eyes him critically and taps the space underneath her eyes. 

“Yes, I can see that,” Thomas says. “Can’t do anything about that but wait, eh?”

* * *

A thunderstorm is making the windows rattle, and Thomas is under the kitchen table.

He couldn’t have stopped himself crawling under here if he’d tried. He’d gone for cover solely on instinct at the sound of thunder and it just seems safer now to stay under, curled up in the fetal position with his arms covering his head. He’s not _crazy_, he knows he’s not currently in a trench with shells whizzing past his ears, he’s… back home… in England, in the Folly… yes, but… it’s so real, like a solid wave of _vestigia _for a moment, the mud lapping at his boots, the rattle of the machine gun being fired next to him, the scratchy canvas of his uniform, the bead of sweat running down his neck, his own breath loud in his ears even with the explosions, and that sharp and omnipresent stench of gunpowder. And now they’ve found him, they’re above him and they’re reaching inside, reaching - a hand on his shoulder, no,

“No!”

There is a bright flash, not from lightning but from Thomas, and then Molly rears back from where she squatted on her haunches to check on him under the table. Her back collides with a kitchen cabinet and she shrinks against it, cradling her cheek in her hand.

“Oh, god.” Thomas starts towards her, his hands raised. He can feel all the energy draining out of him, leaving nothing but shock behind. “Molly, I didn’t mean to-”

She hisses at him, baring all her teeth in a snarl, attempting to scrabble even further away from him, strands of her dark hair flying, she looks feral in this moment. But her eyes gleam with wetness and fear and betrayal, and maybe Thomas isn’t the only one here flashing back to something. What practitioner hurt her before this? Where is the bastard he has to put in the ground?

“Molly…” he can hear his voice breaking. “Molly, I never, I never meant…”

She scrambles to her feet and flees, her breath coming in horrible, hitched gasps that might have been sobs.

Thomas sinks to the floor, hiding his face in his hands. One hand steals into his hair and tugs, hard and punishing.

He _hurt Molly._

He’s losing his grip. Allowing his magic to lash out like that… he can’t do this anymore, he’s a hazard, he needs to be committed to an institution.

It is his duty to the Folly that stays this train of thought, his duty as the last remaining Newtonian practitioner in England. He cannot relinquish his post here. He simply has to _not _go insane… however he might work this. Molly… Molly is an invaluable friend, and Thomas only wishes he could give her anything back for it, anything of value, anything but _this_.

* * *

When he returns to the kitchen, Molly is making dinner. Despite everything, she’s making dinner, bent over the stove, and Thomas finds himself standing at ease in the doorway like an unruly private about to be disciplined. 

“Molly, I…”

She flinches upright, pots and pans clattering loudly as her trembling hands brush against them. She wipes some of her wild hair out of her face and her cheek is still swollen, and Thomas hurts in sympathy. 

“Molly, I’m sorry, I…” But what can he say? What can he possibly say to make any of this anything approaching right? “There are no words.”

She turns towards him and, slowly, she nods.

“I have to have more self-control,” Thomas says, “There is no excuse.”

Molly turns her eyes to the ground, her hands clenched in her dress.

“Were you…?” All these years knowing her, and he has never thought to ask. “What was it that you saw?”

Molly slowly shakes her head.

And then she’s crying, and he’s crying, and they stagger towards each other blindly, with tears streaming down their faces. And he’s holding her, or she’s holding him, and they’re both needing to be held, and they’re both being strong for the other, and dinner burns to a crisp on the stove.


End file.
